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THE EVOLUTION OF MOBILE LEARNING: LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING AHEAD
Ronda Zelezny-Green
University of London10 January 2017
Can we predict the Future...?
www.abebooks.com
“One day every town in America will have a telephone!”
~ U.S. Mayor, (c 1880)
http://thebitchywaiter.blogspot.com/
“The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”
- Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer, British Post Office, 1878.
The first mobile phone
http://www.xianet.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/first-mobile-phone.jpg
The ‘brick’
The Future...?
1989: ‘The future is multi-media’
1999: ‘The future is the Web’
2009: ‘The future is smart mobile’
hof.povray.org
Stev
e W
hee
ler,
Ply
mo
uth
Un
iver
sity
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Multimedia brought the world into the classroom...
Smart technologies will take the classroom into the world.
www.canada.com
“We are becoming distributed beings. Mobile makes the trend more explicit.” - Mark Curtis (2005)
Source: Kelly Hodgkins http://gizmodo.com/5813875/what-happens-in-60-seconds-on-the-internet
Social Media use
>260 Million
Sources from service providers and also http://econsultancy.com
>4 Billion views/day>60 hours/minute
>90 Million
Introduction
Mobile devices are ever-present in today’s society andschools are joining the trend. Devices such as iPods,iPads, MP3 players, mobile phones, and e-readers arenow increasingly being used across the world foreducational purposes.
13
What do you think mobile learning is?Discuss in groups of three
Mobile Learning: Introduction
Mobile learning is broadly defined as people’s appropriation of mobile technologies to enhance their skills or acquire knowledge (Traxler, 2010b)
Early definitions of mobile learning emphasized the technology before eventually recognizing the learners’ role and their mobility as influential factors in defining what this learning activity is (Crompton, 2014; Traxler, 2010a).
Zurita and Nussbaum (2004) suggest that mobile devices can create spaces where knowledge can be constructed among learners through collaboration.M-learning is the delivery of learning through mobile devices (Peters, 2007)
Learningis changing
http://www.slideshare.net/courosa/why-social-networks-matter
Theories of learning
No contemporary theory of learning for the mobile age
Most recent reference to mobile learning in www.infed.org is 1916!
A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Dewey, 1916, “Democracy in Education”
What is distinctive about learning for the mobile age
Distinguish from learning with handheld devices
Mobility as the central concern
Learners are continually on the move
Even learners within a school will move from room to room and shift from topic to topic
Need to understand learning as a labile activity
Embraces learning outside the classroom
Interactions between formal and informal learning
Learning for the mobile age
The processes of coming to know through conversations across multiple contexts amongst people and personal interactive technologies
Vavoula’s study of learning and mobility
March-August 2004
Diary study
44 participants registered
15 kept diary for 2 weeks (161 episodes reported in total)
Broad definition of ‘mobile learning’:
“Learning away from one’s normal learning environment, or learning involving the use of mobile devices”
Results
59% of the reported learning episodes were mobile
49% were not in home or office
8 outdoors, 34 workplace, 10 place of leisure, 3 friends’ house, 1 public transport, 23 other (e.g. places of worship)
Most learning was to enable activity (40%) and/or solve a problem (15%)
Only 5% of mobile and 10% of non-mobile learning was related to a curriculum
Conversation was the main learning method of mobile learning (45%mobile and 21% non-mobile)
Mobile learning involves more activity and interaction than non-mobile
Re-conceptions of learning
Classroom learning
Learning as knowledge transmission and construction
Supported by ICT
How to design and manage an effective learning environment
Mobile learning
Learning as conversation across contexts
Enabled by continual interaction with personal technologies
How people artfully engage with their continually changing surroundings to create transiently stable and effective sites of learning
Learning for the mobile age
The processes of coming to know through conversations across multiple contexts amongst people and personal interactive technologies.
Learning as conversations across contexts
Cole (1996) makes an important distinction between context
“that which surrounds us”
“that which weaves together”
Mirrors distinction in HCI between
context as a ‘shell’ that surrounds the human user of technology
context as arising out of the constructive interaction between people and technology
User Computer
Context
A “shell” view of context
Context through interaction
Context is a dynamic and historicalprocess
to enable appropriate action (learning)
constructed through interaction between people, technology, objects and activities
Constructing Context
Traditional classroom learning is founded on an illusion of stability of context
Teacher, fixed location, common resources, set curriculum
If these are removed then creating temporary islands of relatively stable context is a central concern
Stability of context enables reflective conversation
We construct ‘micro-classrooms’ from the materials of everyday interaction
Constructing Context
Current activity can only be fully understood by taking an historical perspective, to understand how it has been shaped and transformed by previous ideas and practices (Engeström, 1996).
Context can be seen as an ever-playing movie
each frame of current context is a progression from earlier ones
entire movie is a resource for learning
continually being constructed by the cast, from moment to moment, as they share artefacts and create mutual understanding through conversation.
A theory of learning for the mobile age
Learning as conversation across contexts
A cybernetic process of exploration of the world and negotiation of meaning, mediated by technology
Bridging classroom and everyday learning
Containing the possibility for expansive transformation
Why is m-learning thriving?
“Around 62% of all adults across the major European countries now use a mobile phone, according to the research.
Currently, 41% of European adults use SMS, compared to 30% that use the Internet / email.
SMS is particularly popular in the UK where 49% of adults use it, compared to 39% who are online.
In Germany, 43% of adults use SMS as opposed to 29% of adults who use the Internet/email. In France, 30% use SMS compared to 25% who go online.”
Statistics from Gartner (2002)
Why is m-learning thriving?
“Over 50% of all employees spend up to half of their time outside the office.
More than 525 million web-enabled phones will be shipped by 2003.
Worldwide mobile commerce market will reach $200 billion by 2004.
There will be more than 1 billion wireless internet subscribers worldwide by 2005.
Multi-purpose handheld devices (PDA and telephone) will outsell laptop/desktop computers combined by 2005.
Most major US companies will either switch to or adopt wireless networks by 2008.”
Statistics from Empowering Technologies Incorporated cited by
Keegan (2003)
Why is m-learning thriving?
Desmond Keegan (2003) published a book called: ‘The Future of Learning: From eLearning to mLearning.’ In chapter four of his book, Keegan presents and analyses no less than 30 m-learning initiatives across the globe in 2001.
NKI Distance Education in Norway has 400 e-learning courses. During 2003 and 2004 it announced that it had made available mobile learning versions of all its 400 courses. This represents a massive introduction of mobile learning.
Why is m-learning thriving?
Exponential growth in wireless networks, services and devices
Learners are continually demanding more mobile services and experiences
Greater personalisation, flexibility and mobility
Improved access anywhere, anytime
Fills small gaps of time with useful learning events (“stolen moments for learning” David Metcalf)
M-learning enhances collaborative, co-operative and active learning
Mobile communication devices provide opportunities for the optimising of interaction and communication between lecturers and learners, among learners and between members of COPs.
Why is m-learning thriving?
“For the first time in ICT history, we have the right time, the right place and the right idea to have a huge impact on education: handheld computing.”
Soloway (2003)
Why is m-learning thriving?
“The mixing of distance learning with mobile telephony to produce mLearning will provide the future of learning.”
Keegan (2003)
Why is m-learning thriving?
“By 2006, data network access from personally owned mobile devices will be the leading problem facing higher education IT managers.”
Gartner (2004)
Why is m-learning thriving?
“The mobile revolution is finally here. Wherever one looks, the evidence of mobile penetration and adoption is irrefutable: cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, portable game devices, handhelds, tablets and laptops abound. No demographic is immune from this phenomenon. From toddlers to seniors, people are increasingly connected and are digitally communicating with each other in ways that would have been impossible to imagine only a few years ago.”
Wagner (2005)
Why is m-learning thriving?
What is the relation
between m-learning
and e-learning?
E-learning is the macro concept that includes online and mobile learning environments.
M-learning is a subset of e-learning.
E-learning is in turn a subset of distance learning, which is in turn a subset of flexible learning.
m-learning vs e-learning
“M-learning is e-learning through mobile
computational devices”
Quin (2001)
m-learning vs e-learning
Diagram 1: The subsets of flexible learning
Flexible Learning
Distance Learning
E-learning
Online
LearningM-learning
Paper-based
Distance Learning
Contact Learning
(residential/face-to-face)
(Brown, 2004)
Screen size of most devices makes it difficult for users to go through a lot of content
Connectivity and bandwidth issues
Concern for content security
Difficulty in integrating devices to LMSs
High costs of designing programs compatible with different devices.
Technology issues
Source: http://edudemic.com/2012/05/how-to-develop-your-own-mobile-learning-tools/
Is language being dumbed down?
Literacy issues
“Mobile phones are forcing children to become more literate. Without the ability to txt, they
cannot fully participate in their own culture of communication”
Peter Yeomans (2010)
Squeeze txt and literacy
Pedagogy issues
1.Design for the device2.Keep it simple, keep it smart3.Immediate and revisitable
Source: http://www.saffroninteractive.com
What do you think are the advantages of mobile learning? What are the disadvantages?Discuss in groups of three
ADVANTAGES
Learning speed (increased)
Ubiquity of information in content all in one place
Different authoring tools (more than analog learning delivery)
Choose specific programs for specific needs (filtering info)
Cost cheaper than F2F
Information for free (Wikipedia… but may need curation)
Being informed about what’s happening in places you are not located
More environmentally-friendly (less paper used)
Immediacy
Multimodal
Access
One-to-one
Anyone has an opportunity to be a teacher
Inclusive of more people in different areas
Supports (digital) organizing of learning content and experiences
DISADVANTAGES
Copyright issues
Volume of content can be overwhelming
Bad pedagogy (leaving learners to their own devices!); lack of supervision
Context of learning in physical spaces still affects the learning in digital spaces
Certification of mobile learning experiences
47
QUESTIONS?
Thank you!
